Markets Wired

The Federal Trade Commission will hold its second two-day workshop on the future of journalism March 9-10, 2010, in Room 432 of the FTC Headquarters at 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. The agenda and information about the workshop can be found at http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/mar9/agenda.pdf.

Consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet for news and information. Advertisers are moving ads to online sites and scaling back on ad buys as a result of the recession, and news organizations are struggling with large debts they took on during better times. As a result, some are questioning how journalism can survive and thrive in the future.

The FTC’s upcoming workshop will address proposals to better-support and lower the costs of journalism:

• Changes to copyright law have been suggested as means to require news aggregators to pay fees to news-gathering operations. Panelists will discuss whether such changes would be workable and likely achieve the desired results.
• Speakers will consider the potential advantages and disadvantages of combining the interests of for-profit and non-profit investors in hybrid entities, such as so-called L3Cs, as vehicles for new media organizations.
• Speakers will address efforts to make government data more accessible and easily managed in ways that may lower the costs of journalism.
• Panelists will discuss the wide variety of collaborations that news organizations may use to lower their costs and better support journalism.

In December 2009, the FTC held the first two-day workshop to consider a wide range of issues, including: the economics of journalism in print and online; the variety of new business and non-profit models for journalism online; factors relevant to the new economic realities for news organizations, such as behavioral and other online targeted advertising, online news aggregators, and bloggers; and ways in which the costs of journalism could be reduced.

The workshop is free and open to the public. Those planning to attend should arrive early to permit time to go through security screening.